The task of the Section for Research and Development is to carry through research on fundamentals and associated areas, to build up and secure know-how in that field so that current developments flow into the strategic planning of the Digital Library. In this section prototypical solutions are developed and pilot studies set up which form the basis for new developments or optimising services and processes in the regular functioning of the Austrian National Library. The Section for Research and Development cooperates internationally with several institutions and projects and is a partner in many European research projects.
The main focuses at present in the Section are in these areas:
- Optimising of the OCR of historic documents in the context of large-scale digitisation
- Evaluation and prototypical implementation of search engine technologies
- Implementation of web services for digital libraries and for digital long-term archiving
- Interoperability of metadata and digital objects in the context of the European Digital Library (Europeana).
Research projects
Europeana Collections 1914-1918
ABO - Austrian Books Online
The Austrian National Library is digitising its complete historical and public-domain book holdings in a joint project with Google. This endeavour comprises some 600.000 volumes including titles from the early 16th century up to the second half of the 19th century. Approximately 200 million digitised pages are being made available online and free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
The volumes digitized through Austrian Books Online are available via the Digital Library of the Austrian National Library, as well as via Google Books. It is planned to make these items also accessible via Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu), the European Digital Library.
The first phase of the project was launched back in June 2010. By the end of 2010 the preparations for the fully operative project were established; the digitisation proper started in early 2011.
Contact: Mag. Stefan Majewski (stefan.majewski@onb.ac.at)
Homepage: http://www.onb.ac.at/bibliothek/austrianbooksonline.htm
Europeana DSI
The core goal of DSI, an abbreviation for ‚Digital Service Infrastructure‘, is the continued operation and extension of Europeana. This one year project is part of Europeana’s long-term goal, which is a transformation from portal to platform. Within the project, the Austrian National Library is involved in two key aspects: Europeana Labs, a subarea that is specifically designed for the creative industries and Europeana Research. The latter is focuses at researchers whose research is based on the digital collections Europeana can offer.
Contact: Martin Schaller (martin.schaller@onb.ac.at)
Europeana Food and Drink
Europeana Food and Drink is a project funded by the European Commission under the CIP ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) that aims at promoting the wider re-use of the digital resources available through Europeana. Focusing on the rich and vibrant European food and drink culture and heritage, Europeana Food and Drink wishes to engage the general public, creative industries, cultural heritage organisations and the food and drink industries in creating, sharing, learning and making use of food- and drink related content.
The project brings together 28 partners from across 16 European countries and is led by the UK-based Collections Trust. Leading content providers, creative technologists and creative industry partners are working together in order to create an evocative suite of commercial applications and products featuring food- and drink related content catered to specific audiences.
Contact: Angelika Leitner, MSC (angelika.leitner@onb.ac.at), Mag. Zsuzsanna Brunner (zsuzsanna.brunner@onb.ac.at)
Homepage: www.foodanddrinkeurope.eu
Europeana Sounds
Europeana Sounds is a partnership among 24 national libraries, sound institutions, research centres and universities from 12 European countries. The project will give online access to a critical mass of audio-visual digital-objects: over 540.000 high quality sound recordings and 225.000 audio-related objects will be available via Europeana, including classical and folk music, environmental sounds from the natural world as well as oral memories. Europeana Sounds will widen access to a wealth of Europe’s richest materials and show how sound recordings have woven their way into the social, cultural and scientific fabric of their time.
The sounds selected for this project embrace the breadth of Europe’s cultural heritage: classical music and contemporary performances with timeless and universal appeal; traditional and folk music and storytelling; sound effects, environmental sounds and noises from the natural world; languages, accents and dialects and oral recollections, all with a particular resonance in different regions. Together these collections reflect the diverse cultures, histories, languages and creativity of the peoples of Europe over the past 130 years.
Contact: Mag. Zea Frana, BA (zea.frana@onb.ac.at), Mag. Max Kaiser (max.kaiser@onb.ac.at)
Homepage: www.europeanasounds.eu
Europeana Creative
Europeana Creative enables and promotes greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by Europe’s creative industries. Europeana provides access to more than 26 million digitized cultural heritage objects from Europe’s libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. The project Europeana Creative demonstrates that it is possible to facilitate the creative re-use of cultural heritage content and associated metadata by creative industries and will show the social and economic value of cultural content.
Contact: fue@onb.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.europeanacreative.eu, http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-creative
Europeana Newspapers
The Europeana Newspapers Project aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. Within in the three years of the duration of the project, 18 million newspaper pages distributed by 17 European institutions will be made available to the public through Europeana. The main goal is the implantation of a content browser with a special search surface to create direct accessibility for the user.
The refinement technologies to be applied encompass Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Layout Recognition (OLR)/article segmentation, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and page class recognition. Quality assurance and quality prediction mechanisms will be optimized to monitor and control all refinement steps.
Contact: fue@onb.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu
DM2E
During the course of the project more than 19.000.000 digitised pages of manuscripts and related materials will be ingested into the European digital culture portal Europeana.
A transformation pipeline was established in order to automatically convert the various metadata-formats used by the different contributing institutions into the new Europeana Data Model (EDM).
Contact: fue@onb.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.dm2e.eu
Europeana Collections 1914-1918: Remembering the First World War - A Digital Collection of Outstanding Sources from European National Libraries
Europeana Collections 1914-1918 created by the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War – a substantial digital collection of material from national library collections of ten libraries and other partners in eight countries that found themselves on different sides of the historic conflict.
Contact: fue@onb.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.europeana-collections-1914-1918.eu
SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments)
The EU FP7 ICT Project SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments), running since February 2011, was initiated in order to address these Big Data challenges. In particular, data analysis and scientific workflow management play an important role. Technical development is carried out in three sub-projects and will be validated in three testbeds: 1) Web Archive, 2) Large-scale digital repositories, 3) Scientific data sets. The first two scenarios are here of primary interest for the Austrian National Library. Scalability is ensured by using cloud-based solutions based on Apache Hadoop, a framework for processing large amounts of data.
Contact: fue@onb.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.scape-project.eu
Research and Development
Department DirectorMag. Max Kaiser
Josefsplatz 1
A-1015 Wien
(+43 1) 534 10-370
